Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth. Those were the golden words of Mahatma Gandhi! TRUTH is what this blog is about... truth about Nithyananda and his cult. Don't fall prey to his charming lies... before you learn more about his real intent from the ex-members of his cult.
SATYAMEVA JAYATE (Let truth alone triumph!)

Control the physical and social environment; control the devotee’s time

Keep the person unaware of what’s going on & how he is being changed step by step

Manipulate rewards, punishments and experiences to check the expression of the person’s former identity

Manipulate rewards, punishments and experiences to promote conformity

Set a closed system of logic, a hierarchy permitting no feedback, with top-down orders

***

If you for some reason decide to surrender in devotion to Swami
Nithyananda, the following anecdote is likely to be part of your initial
lessons. It’s one he keeps recounting to the multitudes at his ashram
in Bidadi, near Bangalore, curious and eager to have his wisdom rub off
on them: A professor happens to visit a Zen master. While the master
quietly serves tea, the professor blabbers on about Zen. The master
keeps filling the visitor’s cup till it started overflowing. The
professor blurts out, “It’s full! No more will go in!” “This is you,”
the master says. “How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your
cup?”
Become empty first. This is one of Nit­hya­nanda’s first
commandments. It’s also probably one of the most essential. As devotees
drop their critical defences, he fills them with his worldview, his aura
to transform them into loyal followers. This model of indoctrination is
not unique to Nithyananda. Across India, for that matter elsewhere, one
of the first sermons that godmen will drill into devotees is, outsource
the thinking to the guru while devotees free their minds in pursuit of the blissful feeling
of spirituality. As Bhargavi Hemmige, a research scholar at Mysore
University who spent some time at Nithyananda’s ashram out of academic
curiosity, recollects, “He kept telling us not to use our minds. It’s a
monkey that misleads, he told us.”

Others who have gone through the cycle of recrimination and defence include Satya Sai Baba, the late Osho, and Baba Ramdev

What else but complete control over the mind can explain the
ineluctable hold India’s godmen have over their devotees? So much so,
grievous accusations of colossal financial transgressions, rape and
child abuse, even murder do not seem to diminish their faith. On the
contrary, in the case of Asaram Bapu, a godman mired in controversy and
recently arrested by Rajasthan police on charges of sexually assaulting a
15-year-old girl, they seem to shore up their belief in defiance.

“For
devotees, it isn’t a matter of right or wrong. It’s about protecting
the one who protects them. That’s all that matters to them.”Indira Sharma, President, Indian Psychiatric Society

As
Asaram evaded imminent arrest, throngs of his followers gathered at
Jantar Mantar in Delhi to push for his release and sounded the
battle-cry from a makeshift stage. “Our fight will go on until the
conspiracists give up trying to tarnish Bapu’s image. We should send a
clear message by amassing at the next satsang in such large numbers that
there should be no place left for us to sit,” said one, to loud roars
of approval from the crowd. “Our victory is certain. Only then will we
leave,” exclaimed another devotee. “I have not eaten a thing in 48
hours, but gurudev is giving me the strength to go on and I can for
another five days.” At Jantar Mantar, they spend most of their time
chanting ‘Hari Om’; in other places, Asaram’s devotees have blocked
roads and railway tracks and even assaulted media personnel.
Godmen and controversies have been bedfellows for long in India but this poses no threat to their cult appeal (see box for some of our flourishing gurus and the controversies associated with them). At the Jantar Mantar demonstration, an Asaram devotee from Himachal Pradesh began to tell Outlook
of his indebtedness. “Even if Lord Shiva himself appears and tells me
not to believe in Bapu, I will tell him I cannot give up. I know what I
have gained from him. He has saved me from committing suicide. So, even
if he kills off the entire world, Bapu will still be god for me. It’s
another matter that he will not do something like this,” he says, before
he’s whisked away by other followers angry with the media. Asked what
was so special about Asaram, Akanksha Bhatnagar, a 20-year-old mca
student from Delhi, gushes with a twinkle in her eyes, “You will realise
when you come to one of his sermons. I have no words to express.” For
his devotees, Bapu is akin a body of water—you can thrash him as much as
you want, there will be a few splashes, but nothing that will affect
him. “I am sure he will come out shining even brighter after this
episode,” Bhatnagar adds. Ask devotees of other godmen, like Sai Baba,
Ramdev, Jayendra Saraswati or Nirankari Baba, and you are likely to get
the same mix of uncritical reverence that borders on irrationality.

Bad press Women protesting against Asaram Bapu. (Photograph by PTI)

“Swami
Nityananda kept asking devotees not to use their minds. He kept telling
us that. He said the mind is a monkey that misleads.”Bhargavi Hemmige, Researcher, Mysore University

How is it that godmen manage to win such unquestioning submission?
Interviews with devotees, some of whom have fallen out with their gurus,
detail an elaborate spiel that gurus have in place to control a
devotee’s free thinking capabilities. The initial assault on independent
thinking often comes with sleep deprivation: devotees are often allowed
no more than four hours of sleep. What is thought of as a part of the
frugal character of ashram life actually undercuts a devotee’s critical
thinking. This is combined with a heavy work schedule and unreasonable
deadlines that overwhelm a person’s routine. “This just doesn’t leave
any time for you to sit and reflect. And the moment you do, you fall
asleep,” says Anushka Gopal (name changed on request), a
Bangalore-based woman who spent five years at the ashram of a popular
south Indian guru but chose to walk out after his sexual misconduct was
caught on tape.
Another cog in the brainwashing machinery is a pseudonym that goes on
to become the ‘real’ identity of the person. The change is subtle but
its long-term impact is drastic when it comes to erasing a devotee’s
past. This is demonstrated effectively in the case of 35-year-old hotel
management guru Santosh, now known as Shantimayananda after “great
healing and transformation”. His parents unsuccessfully petitioned the
Karnataka High Court to have him come back from Nithyananda’s ashram in
Bidadi, where he has been living for six years now. “He has no concern
for his mother and father, he simply thinks Nithyananda is god,” says
Munnur Krishnamurthy, his distraught father.

“As
publications in-charge for the guru, I once went to Tamil Nadu and
bought and burnt several copies of a magazine that spoke against him.”Lenin Karuppan, Whistleblower on Swami Nithyananda

The next stage is to have older devotees perpetuate the guru’s aura and
suppress an acolyte’s individuality. What the group believes is what
you should believe, they are told. Meanwhile, the guru does his bit by
instilling the ideal of gurubhakti and the fear of gurudroha. “He kept
brainwashing devotees by saying all sins can be forgiven—but not
guru­droha,” says Hemmige. To add more enigma to their aura, several of
them even take to dressing as gods—Nithyananda often pretends to be
Shiva-like and Asaram and Kripaluji takes on a Krishna-like get-up.
Prabir Ghosh, a noted rationalist from Calcutta who claims to have taken
on several hundreds of godmen, says all of them inevitably make claims
of possessing some supernatural power—another important component in
their marketing strategy. Rationalists argue that what is merely a
placebo effect is often touted as a miraculous cure. One devotee at
Jantar Mantar said Asaram cured her mother of breast cancer. Devotees
also seek to protect their belief (and thus self-interest) by
perpetuating the guru’s cult and refusing to buy into accusations of
wrongdoings. “For them it’s not an issue of right or wrong,” says Indira
Sharma, president of the Indian Psychiatric Society. “It’s as basic as
protecting the one who protects you. It’s all what matters to them.”

Photograph by Reuters, From Outlook 16 September 2013

Many followers come from a religious background, exposed to a
reverential following of gurus. Then there are some hapless souls who
submit to faith afresh. But the well-oiled machinery at ashrams is
powerful enough to work on the minds of those with advanced degrees in
science (who often possess a fine streak of credulity) or even without
any of the circumstantial or emotional baggage that makes some people
prone to unquestioning submission to a strong guru figure. “To the more
sceptical devotees, the guru would say don’t believe what he says. When
we realised he was not trying to sell us his ideas, we became more
receptive,” says Gopal, who studied at top engineering institutions in
India and the US. “All this while, I had no idea I was being subjected
to psychological slavery. It’s a kind of mind trickery,” she adds. It
took her six months to realise her guru could be wrong. The revelation
of the sex tapes was what finally led her to walk out of the ashram.

“The
disciple longs to merge into a powerful, wise, perfect self-object—the
guru. The guru is great. Partaking of his power, I am great too.”Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar, Scholar who has studied godmen

There
is also the obvious influence that money power can bring for these
gurus. Lenin Karuppan, who is now acknowledged as the whistleblower who
leaked the sex tapes that allegedly feature Nithyananda and a Tamil film
actress, recounts how he himself once helped snuff out dissent as the
publications-in-charge for the guru. When Nakkeeran published
an article that the guru deemed unfit for the public, he rushed to Tamil
Nadu, and along with Nithyananda’s followers, he bought about a lakh
copies and burnt them. But even he has words of praise for Nithyananda’s
“mesmerising oratorical skills and knowledge of Hindu religious
texts”.
Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar, a Goa-based scholar who has studied
godmen in India, says devotees often attribute exaggerated positive
qualities to their guru—unlike adults in a mature love relationship, who
are in touch with their partner’s realistic qualities and failings­.
“They deny unwanted characteristics that cause a ‘split’ in the mind.
The disciple longs to merge into a good and powerful, wise and perfect
self-object­—which is the guru. In other words, the guru is great, and
thus, participating in his power, I am great too,” she elaborates. “The
violent outbreaks by stern believers in support of their guru, as we
have seen in Asaram’s case, are linked to this: accepting that the
idealised self-object has failed means also accepting one’s own failure,
which might lead to a disintegration of the self, which needs to be
fought off by denying any (countering) facts and better knowledge.”
It’s not difficult to imagine that perhaps it is this systematic
domination of the mind of the devotee that lay behind a poster at a
Jantar Mantar that read, “Nigorey bhi kah rahey yeh baat, bapuji hai paak saaf (Even the most stubborn proclaim that Bapu (Asaram) is squeaky clean).”